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April 22, 2018 Subject:
Boer vs Brit
The people who think about American foreign policy have recently emerged from their post-Vietnam hangovers, but it is not clear that they have come any
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closer to a realistic appreciation of limited war. Like people getting over real hangovers, they seem to believe that some perfect mean can be struck between abstinence and indulgence. They have gotten over “Never again,” and now think in terms of “Yes, I will, but not too much, and only under the right circumstances.” Just what those circumstances may be is under debate, but it does seem as if the lesson now being drawn from the Vietnam war is that we should look for little wars that will be, if not splendid, then rationally fought and soon over. “Quick-reaction forces” will act decisively to end clear threats to our vital interests and will not get bogged down in messy local conflicts. The value of Thomas Pakenham’s superb book on the Boer War is that it demonstrates just how fanciful is the present understanding of war. The Boer War, as Pakenham describes it, was supposed to be the splendid, limited war, par excellence. The main worry of many of the officers dispatched from Britain to fight in South Africa was that the war would be over before they arrived. Yet the war lasted over two years and killed, by one means or another, about 100,000 white men, women, and children. The way in which Great Britain successfully came to terms with the nasty drawn-out reality of that war provides the subject of Pakenham’s book. The war was a distinctly political effort. There was no military threat to the security of the British empire. The High Commissioner for South Africa, Alfred Milner, freely admitted in private that he had provoked the war by thwarting the progress of negotiations that could have resolved the immediate problem, which was how to obtain political rights for the English-speaking immigrants to the Dutch-settled Republic of Transvaal. “I precipitated the crisis which was inevitable, before it was too late. It is not a very agreeable, and in many eyes, not a very creditable piece of business to have been largely instrumental in bringing about a large war.” Milner’s object was to break the political power of the Boers, the descendants of the original Dutch colonials, and to create an Anglicized South Africa that would become a part of a white British Commonwealth as strong and diverse as Britain alone was small and weak. Pakenham’s book, however, is not essentially about politics, national security, or theories of coercive diplomacy, but about the business of killing soldiers, a subject we tend not to want to think about. Two themes emerge from the book. The first is that the problems of conducting a war are almost incomprehensible in peacetime, and are comprehended slowly, if at all, only after the fighting begins; all the abstract wisdom in the world seems to be of singularly little value without the benefit of practice with the real thing. The second theme has to do with the attitudes of Western society toward war. The technical revolution that most affected the Boer War was the widespread availability of rapid-fire rifles firing smokeless ammunition. This had the effect of transforming the battlefield into a place in which the enemy could riddle you with bullets before you ever saw him. The temptation may be strong to despise the military mind for not having seen the answer to this problem ahead of time: the men should spread out and take cover so as to present less of a target to massed rifle fire. But this response was just as obscure, at the time, to the civilian correspondents observing the British as it was to the British military. One newspaperman watched as British troops attacked up a hill devoid of cover. How were they to avoid being mowed down as they had been in the past? And then came the most extraordinary revolution, sudden, astounding, brilliant, almost incomprehensible. Across the railways, the South Lancashires suddenly rose up out of the ground . . . and all began to run, not in stiff lines, but with the graceful spreading of a bird’s wings, straight up the hill. . . . Similarly, the British had to solve the problem of how to get across the Tugela River along which the Boers had entrenched themselves. Three times the troops were sent out, and three times they were called back by the senior British officer, Redverse Buller, who had the sense to recognize that he had not yet solved the problem. For this he was accused, by civilians and officers, of having lost his nerve. The fourth time, he planned an attack that involved scrambling from hill to hill, behind an artillery barrage, until the Boer line of defense was gotten around. A simple enough plan, and successful, but one intelligent civilian present at the scene, Winston Churchill, doubted its wisdom. Before condemning the stupidity of soldiers, we might consider the problem of how to go about getting men who are nicely dispersed, hidden, and safe to stand up and walk into a field of fire, or even just to sit up and use their weapons, when the inevitable time to move forward comes. After the problem has been worked out in battle, the solution is trivially obvious. You need officers who are much braver but also more sensible than before, who are bold enough to walk about for hours in the middle of a field drenched in bullets and say, “If I give you a lead, if your General gives you a lead—will you come on?,” but who are more levelheaded than the officer who issued this request and who then led his men into an indefensible position. Paradoxically, personal leadership becomes more important as technology increases the deadliness of war. War can only be fully comprehended by fighting it, but an army must be willing to learn, and able to survive in battle until it has learned. The British army made many mistakes but redeemed itself by its willingness to relieve officers who had not demonstrated an ability to learn the new facts of war, and to promote those who had. The practice of relieving unworthy officers was so common that it acquired a name, Stellenbosch-ing, after the rear-area town to which these unhappy officers were sent. By contrast, battlefield promotions and demotions were rare in the American army in Vietnam. The willingness to learn, however, is nothing if the morale of the army disintegrates while it goes through the necessary period of adjustment, as men die without apparent purpose. This is where personal leadership again comes in. Why did the British army not become unfit for combat after three unsuccessful efforts to cross the Tugela? The answer, in large part, is Redverse Buller. An account of one unsuccessful attack written by a private is instructive: “Advance” was the order. We did, a riderless horse galloped through us. . . . We got up again unhurt, and as we went, whizz-whizz-whizz-whizz, came the bullets, over went a couple of our fellows, and a shell came in front and blinded us. I was spitting dust for the next few minutes, and it was almost like groping in the dark, but we heard a voice behind us. “Steady, men, don’t lose your heads.” It was Buller’s. We did not lose them after that, but gripped our rifles and made straight through the smoke. Buller’s gallantry created a bond between his men and him that survived repeated defeats, and that gave Buller the time to learn the modern way of war. One wonders whether students of management in the Pentagon today understand this phenomenon, and whether average American soldiers in Vietnam had enough faith in their officers to sustain them as they muddled their way toward an understanding of rural counterinsurgency. The other theme in Pakenham’s book is less explicitly military. One is struck by a number of events Pakenham reports. The British soldiers cheered when they won battles. Victories were celebrated in London. Even now in America we half-recall the names of British victories in South Africa, though we are not sure whether we read them in Kipling or in a history book: Kimberly, Mafeking, Ladysmith. In a very real sense, the war was glorious for the British, and not only for civilians and aristocrats. A private wrote home after a battle: I felt sick at the sight of the dead and dying, horrible sight, awful in their ghastliness, blood to meet the eyes, groans to meet the ears, and among this we had to sleep . . . but strange as it may seem, I am eager to be in battle again now. . . . The Boer War was morally ambiguous to a greater degree than any we have had to fight. Winston Churchill was strong for the war, but in awe of the Boers. After a battle, writes Pakenham, he had heard a sound which was even worse than the sound of shells; the sound of Boers singing psalms. “It struck the fear of God in me. What sort of men were we fighting? They have the better cause—and the cause is everything—at least I mean to them it is the better cause.” Churchill sometimes believed the British wanted nothing out of the war but control of the gold mines of Johannesburg. Yet he never doubted the propriety of the war, any more than did the British infantryman. There was a time when it did not occur to men who might have been our grandfathers—men of the age of the veterans still alive when Pakenham interviewed them for his book—to question the idea that it was, if not sweet, then natural to kill and be killed when your country called you. It was simply not true for them that there was no fate worse than death. The suicides of many officers who were Stellenbosch-ed suggest what was worse than death. It is easy to explain but also easy to forget the decay of the religious faith and nationalism that constituted the morale of the West. Until the day before yesterday, historically, the moral foundation for limited war existed in the great democracies in a way that it does not now. One wonders whether this, too, has crossed the minds of the men who must think about our next war. Pakenham’s book is more like a novel than a history in that it illuminates the psychological as well as the material dimensions of war, and forces us to reflect upon the implications of the changes that have occurred within ourselves.
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